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Delving into preschool teachers’ approaches and knowledge on social skills and its relationship to school readiness
Rafiah Kassim1, Fatin Aliana Mohd Radzi2, Sharifah Muzlia Syed Mustafa3.
The adage ‘it does not take too much schooling to become a preschool teacher’ needs
addressing. Teachers play a pivotal role in educating preschoolers’ educational journey, by
preparing children for overall readiness to school and to learn. The first objective of this
qualitative study is to discover if the preschool teachers’ teaching approaches on social skills.
Secondly, it is to determine teachers’ knowledge and understanding on the relationship between
social skills and school readiness towards preschoolers’ readiness for future success. The data
retrieved were from two Malaysian preschools with ten teachers as respondents and interview
questions were recorded according to protocols. The interviewing and observation session took
over a period of three days for two weeks for each school. The study’s conceptual 2 framework
discusses on the two facets of social skills namely communication and emotion, with theories
and approaches to nurture school readiness. The finding through interviews and questionnaire
found that teachers from School A and B understood and has knowledge of social skills.
However, during numerous visits to both school researcher’s findings indicated there is a
difference in teaching approaches between School A and B. In School A, researcher saw the
application of the Montessori approach, whilst in School B researcher found there was no
specific approach. Henceforth, the study observed the relapse between social skills and school
readiness due to lack of teaching approaches. Thus, reintroducing and reshaping social skills
curriculum with theories and approaches that relates to school readiness. These contributions
allow preschoolers to enjoy the benefit of learning with knowledgeable teachers’ curriculum
and teaching methods that has been up-scaled to meet the needs of today’s children.
Affiliation:
- Universiti Teknologi MARA, UiTM Puncak Alam Campus,, Malaysia
- Universiti Teknologi MARA, UiTM Puncak Alam Campus,, Malaysia
- Universiti Teknologi MARA, UiTM Puncak Alam Campus,, Malaysia
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